I've seen this complaint before, but I don't understand what people are talking about. I bought a Sony "mechless" head unit for my car so I could use BT for playing music, and it sounds fine to me. FWIW I'm not one of those that thinks 128K CBR MP3 sounds fine, I can usually tell up to at least 192K MP3 that it *is* MP3, ie I can hear the compression artifacts. The MP3s I put on my phone are compressed to VBR0, J-Stereo. It sounds quite decent in my car, plenty of "punch" as you put it. Granted I do have the bass and treble hiked a bit, but no different than if I were using the line in instead.

So what is this terrible added compression in BT that destroys fidelity that people speak of?

So you're totally okay with the asinine idea that for a simple traffic stop it's cool if they start shining all kinds of lights and doing other scans to see if they can trump up what they've got you on? That's fucking ridiculous. There's absolutely nothing reasonable about that, or the scenario under which this happened. Claiming the bag looked like it was trying to be hidden is incredibly thin. People have messy cars. Is anything peeking out from under the seat immediately suspicious and warranting a search?

Well the reason is that if the US doesn't give up control, countries have been threatening with building their own internet infrastructure to run in parallel.

Since when was "do what I/we want or I'm going to take my ball and go elsewhere" been a valid reason?

If these countries (Brazil, Russia, etc) did create a "second internet", then Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, would all be shut off from their customers in those regions.

As far as I can tell, they'll do the same thing once control is globalized. At least now, they can say "fine, we'll make our own Internet" and the rest of the sane world can say "cool, see you later, good luck with your Internet without any of the shit your people actually want because we don't care to jump through your retarded hoops to appease your insignificant ass" (and yes, it really is a matter of insignificance because the shit most of these countries are yammering about and want control for is to further enforce their own restrictions on others, whereas we enforce openness (for the most part anyway, far more open than many of these other countries would have it be)). Besides, regardless of how it works out, we already know most big Internet businesses will do what they need to to ensure their service is still available, but I'd rather that choice be at the corporations level, and not made a requirement at the behest of tantrum throwing nations/governments.

Can't do the math?

They get a lower customer base, lower potential profit, lower actual revenue. Unless the spend the R&D on developing their platform to conform to the "second internet".

Why yes, yes we can, and it's already been done. Look at what Google did with China. We didn't have to give up control of the openness of the Internet to the rest of the world. Let the nations that hate all that freedom build their own fucking Great Firewall and control their people that way. As I said above, if the Internet companies give enough of a fuck, they'll find a way to make stuff work, and that's as it should be, IMO.

This does not make sense to me. It's not just "a" Internet or "a" Web, they are "the" Internet and "the" Web. Unlike the Phonograph, there are not multiple vendors and multiple versions. It's all one very unique thing.

"everyone's been sucked into the whirlpool of razor-thin profit margins"

Bullshit. Phones are quite a profit generator. Companies like OnePlus have proven that. $600 and $700 phones produce at least $200 in revenue over the actual cost of the phone.

That said, it's not just the OEMs that are at fault here. As someone else mentioned, the carriers are quite a problem as well. Take my Verizon Galaxy S4. Verizon has no impetus to doing anything but a carrier unlock. It's got all their crap on it. They also required Samsung to lock the bootloader, and even now that I am no longer a Verizon customer, they (Samsung) will not undo the lock. The phone is in great shape and perfectly viable but not worth selling, and not really usable because it's stuck with Verizon's shit on it. No more updates, no changing Android flavors, nothing. Pretty paper weight. That is what needs to change. When you leave a carrier, if you've paid for the phone, it needs to be unlocked in every possible way.

...why not focus on the fact that even on the most current OS of your preference, a lot of Unicode shows up as dominoes/glyphs instead of the proper character. Lets make Unicode actually work universally before adding frilly crap, eh?

That muggers/thieves will pick people who slouch and look down/avoid eye contact, has been reported on before, and It's not false. Such posture/behavior telegraphs that you're a target easy for the picking, not likely to fight back. Walking upright, being willing to make eye contact is something people with at least some sense of self worth, etc. do, and make you a much less attractive target.

I used to use NoScript + RequestPolicy myself, but I got tired of having to regex some sites to work, etc. The way websites are now makes it such a monumental hassle. I still use NoScript but I use it along with Privacy Badger. Still pretty good blocking/protection, but not nearly as much regex chicanery like RP required.

"This follows news from earlier this year that the MAME team would be switching to a true Open Source license for the project and concentrating on more than just arcade games."

This somewhat confuses me. M.A.M.E. stands for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. While the concession stand was part of the arcade (depending on what one you went to), most wouldn't consider those machines "arcade machines." This popcorn machine has a game in it though, so I can see that. I suppose even the redemption games and such might get a pass. So what else would they focus on besides arcade games with the name of the emulator being all about that specifically? Will they start emulating the coin changers? Hot dog rollers? Cotton candy spinner?

To add to this, it's not unlike what was going on when the first Athlons came out. AMD was having a rough time meeting demand for lower speed chips so they started re-badging higher speed chips as the lower. I lucked out and it turned out my 750MHz CPU was actually a 900MHz CPU clocked at 750MHz. Other buyers of proper 750's would have no valid complaint, they got what they paid for.